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Wednesday, 18 June 2014

How to Make the Table of Contents go Live on the Kindle Reader

Formatting
table of contents links to make a book easy to navigate around may appear fine
when viewed on Word and on the look inside preview on Amazon. However, the TOC may not be live within the kindle reader. How can the publisher create a NCX File to make these links live? Here's how.

How
to Make TOC Live in the Ereader

Table of Contents in Kindle Aren't Live

Creating
a table of contents by creating links within the document via the use ofbookmarks is covered in another article within this blog. This article focuses
upon how to make the table of contents live within the Kindle so
that the reader is able to navigate to any chapter without having to scroll to
the contents page.

What
is the NXS File in Epub Books?

Here we can see the Kindle has merely created links to the cover of the book, the beginning and end,. The contents appears greyed out (arrowed). This basic navigation is insufficient for the Kindle user who wants to be able to navigate to chapters without having to find the contents page.

This contents element of the book is known as NCX which stands for Navigation Control file
for XML. It appears as a list of links that sits next to the Epub version of
your book, each link pointing to a particular chapter.

Creating
Table of Contents for Easy Navigation

This
meant that the person reading would have to keep scrolling to the contents page
to find a particular chapter. In order to ensure the Kindle recognizes the
table of contents, I had to process the book document so that the Kindle
automatically reads the NCX file and creates the chapter links.

Tips
for Creating Contents Links for Epublishing

NXS is Read by Kindle Creating Live Links

This second screenshot (right) shows, after I had solved the problem, the Kindle reader
has automatically created links to the chapters within the book. Here’s how I
solved the problem.

Create
Live Contents in the Kindle Reader for your Book

Firstly,
follow the steps outlined in another article on this blog, on how to createlinks to chapters within the book. The contents within any ebook should be located near the
beginning. There should be no page numbers, as these are meaningless in
an ebook.

To
make the Kindle automatically create live links within the Kindle reader, save
the document (likely to be Word). There are several ways of making the TOC go
live within the Kindle, but I have found this the simplest.

3 Once
Callibre software is uploaded to your computer, add you book to the library. Callibre give
options for adding your book cover, tags and other metadata about your book. It's pretty self-explanatory.

4 Once
the metadata of your book is done, convert the file to EPUB (there are a number
of options you can choose from, including MOBI). You can see conversion options on the
top right of the screen once your book is added.

5 Callibre
will convert your book to Epub. You can then downloads the Epub file onto your
computer.

6 Now
go into Amazon KDP to upload the epub file of your book to Amazon's publishing platform.

7 Don’t
use Amazon’s online previewer, as this won’t reveal if the NCX file of your
book are live. I uploaded 8 Amazon’s Kindle for PC. A free download that simply
enables you to read books as a Kindle on your computer.

9 Use
the download option on Amazon’s KDP to preview your book.

As
can be seen on the second screenshot, the Kindle previewer has automatically
recognized the NXS file and created a list of links, where the person reading
the book can easily navigate around.

Create
Live Contents via NXS File in Epub for Publishing

Unless
you create a table of contents and save your book file as Epub, the Kindle
previewer won’t recognize there is a TOC in your book and it will be more
difficult to navigate. To make your book easy to navigate around, create a
table of contents as described in another article on this blog.

Once
your book has been converted into an Epub, generating an NCX file, the Kindle won’t
recognize it, and the table of contents won’t appear live on the Kindle. This could
make navigation difficult for the person reading your book on the Kindle. By uploading
Callibre and converting your book into Epub, the NCX element will readable by the
Kindle device, enabling the customer to easily navigate around your book.